A relatively tame week of releases, with the star being Skylanders: Swap Force. This series just prints money, especially now that you can split and merge toys to create new warriors. How cool is that?

The other biggies this week include Goodbye Deponia, The Stanley Parable: HD Remix, and The Wolf Among Us arrives on the PlayStation Network after being out for a few days on the Xbox 360 and PC already.

Skylanders has had a bit of an odd history. Initially, it launched under the auspices of the Spyro name, and made a very small splash in the market -- so small, that barely anyone knew what it was. Fast forward to six months later, and it was the hottest toy on the shelves, so much so that many retailers couldn't even keep it stocked consistently.

A sequel was greenlit, and the rest was history, as Activision raked in over a billion dollars from the Skylanders franchise alone. It's a massive success, and now, the third iteration is attempting to claim the throne once again, fighting off the juggernaut that is Disney Infinity.

Let's just say it's going to be a very interesting holiday season for videogame toys.

The entire Skylanders series appeals to me in a lot of ways, most of all how it reminds me of cartoons I used to watch as a kid. This latest trailer for SWAP Force really shows off what I mean by that, and really makes me wi...

Okay first of all the creature in the header here looks like something from a nightmare. Just, so creepy.
Well whatever it is, it's one of four new Skylanders playable in SWAP Force. Two of them are also just normal Skylander...

Activision will be at gamescom and are planning to wave their giant wads of money around as they will have the biggest ever demo-theater ever built in gamescom history for Destiny. It comes in at 72ft in length, 43ft wide, a...

Activision’s Skylanders franchise has always smelled of a money grab to me. Copperish, like the smell of old pennies scrounged up by hard-working parents so little Linda Anne can have all the newest and coolest Skylanders characters while mom and dad work three jobs amidst recession. Jim Sterling is rather partial to the plastic lot, however, so they can’t be all bad, right?

In fact, they’re not. The new Skylanders: Swap Force is indeed rather cute and pretty fun. Vacuous, but quaint enough.

Skylanders is videogames as toys; or, Toys: The Videogame. I guess I forgot that videogames practically were, once upon a time. It’s no less inane and gimmicky and capitalistic than the stupid garbage we pestered parents for 20 years ago, but it’s a heck of a lot more polished and less likely to break like the slot cars I took around hairpin turns too quickly causing them to go flying off the track. Plus, what can be more embarrassing than having paid money for pogs?

We are so used to waiting insufferably long periods of time for Japanese games to be localized and brought out West that we often imagine Japan as this floating island of privilege and good fortune. How easily do we forget th...

Skylanders: Swap Force is targeting October 13, Oct. 16, and Oct. 18 for North America, Australia, and Europe, respectively. This new installment, centered around swappable parts for characters, will be out on most every syst...

Activision sent a box of those Skylanders Giants Happy Meal toys over. Bereft of anything interesting to do, I decided to review them. I didn't really review them, though. I just rambled sarcastically while playing with toys.
Videogame journalism is real.

This month, the inevitable will happen for the billion-dollar Skylanders franchise: it'll pair up with McDonald's for placement in Happy Meals. Nine toys based on Skylanders Giants will be offered from April 12 to M...

Disney has sent us a new batch of screens from the Monsters University portion of Disney Infinity, which are based on the upcoming Pixar sequel to Monsters Inc.
These new shots show off quite a bit of the game's two modes -- ...

Activision's Skylanders franchise just topped $1 billion in worldwide retail sales, the company announced, inclusive of its toys and accessories, and hit that milestone in only 15 months.
Last week, we reported over 100...

Bobby Kotick, Activision's double-Satanic CEO, has been summoned from the Blood Waters to provide his nefarious opinion on the Wii, though he ended up instead discussing the Wii U, and its performance since launch. The o...

Activision's Skylanders franchise surpassed $500 million in total revenue, with over 100 million toys sold throughout the U.S., the company announced at their Toy Fair 2013 press conference.
The franchise reached this m...

The next Skylanders game was revealed early in the morning today and it's going to let you swap different toy parts to make new heroes. Yes, you get to break the toys in half, but on purpose!
Skylanders: Swap Force has a pre...

The next Skylanders is the last thing fans were probably expecting as there's three major changes going on with Swap Force, the new entry in the series. For starters, it's not developer Toys for Bob making this one. Vicarious Visions, the team responsible for the 3DS version of Skylanders Adventure, and the Wii U version of Skylanders Giants, is in charge of making the core versions this time around (With N-Space doing the 3DS version and Beenox handling the Wii version).

I'm not even going to give you a second to doubt another studio handling things here -- Vicarious is really bringing it. The studio is using a new graphics engine that can very easily be mistaken for a Pixar movie. Seriously, it's that good looking.

The biggest changes, though, are with the new toys. Swap Force is adding 32 new Skylanders heroes, 16 of which you can pull in half and fuse different top and bottom parts together to create new Skylanders. Take that in for a second. That's a total of 256 unique combos.